Israel: A Palestinian Trail of Tears

There is a Middle Eastern state that repeatedly disobeys United Nations directives issued to it. This state has weapons of mass destruction and violates its neighbor’s borders on a routine basis. When it does, it commits ethnic cleansing and the settler seizure of land. It also maintains a strict system of apartheid within its own borders.

Palestinian refugees, 1948.

By all definitions laid out by the United States and their buddies in the United Nations, this would be classified as a “rogue state,” and yet they don’t call it such. The state in question is Israel, sacred cow of the United States and the European Union; bane of the Arab and Muslim world. This resentment and fear of Israel is a reaction to Israel’s non-stop aggression, which has been aggravated in the past five years and is getting worse due to land-grabbing by Israel. On January 9, Israel demolished a Palestinian neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem to facilitate the building of a 1,400-home Israeli settlement. Even the conservative UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki-Moon denounced it, saying “Such actions seriously prejudice the possibility of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” In addition to that, Israel is also constructing other large settlements throughout Palestine’s occupied territories.

This isn’t just mere expansion; it is ethnic cleansing. It is essentially a replay of the 1831 Trail of Tears, happening right now in 2011. When a Palestinian neighborhood is targeted for a settlement, Israeli soldiers are deployed to the area. Palestinian families are ordered out of their own homes at gun point. Their homes are then subsequently ransacked for valuables and looted. Afterwards, the homes are demolished. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians are left destitute, their possessions and homes stolen from them simply because of their race. Through displacing Palestinian families in this manner and replacing them with large settlements for Jewish citizens, Israel is consolidating its occupied territories into Israeli provinces in a reprehensible way.